Graphemes - Definition and Overview

A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols.

In a phonological orthography a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic — such as the spellings used most widely for written English — multiple graphemes may represent a single phonemes. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. An example of a trigraph is the tch in itch.

Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the word and, which contains three phonemes.

See also

• Digraph (orthography)
• Trigraph (orthography)
• Allograph (orthography)

External link

• phonemic awareness (http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Phonemic_awareness)